History is an important determinant of politics. Political scientists have paid special attention to the influence of three historical processes: (1) how states have been formed; (2) how socio-economic transformation (or modernization) has influenced the nature of politics; and (3) how institutions influence economic performance. The changes that these processes have brought are especially evident in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Africa is the outlier because the continent never went through the same type of agrarian revolution that laid the foundation for state development on the other continents. Lack of exchanges with other regions that would spur transformation of the productive forces reinforced its backwardness. When the European colonizers took over, they acted with little or no respect for the local conditions. One of their first measures was to modernize its low-yielding, small-scale agriculture. Trying to incorporate people into a modern state system and economy, however, proved difficult. Much of Africa’s historical legacy is social and informal. It does not easily lend itself to state control. Producers on the land escape through focusing on subsistence rather than commercial crops, those in the urban areas by relying on unofficial rules. The dominant cultural orientation is to evade the long arm of the state. The idea of a social contract between ruler and ruled has been hard to nurture in post-colonial Africa. Instead, history has left the region with a mode of development that relies on intermittent and flexible institutional arrangements, with direct consequences for how society is governed. The prevalence of clientelism, rather than ideology, is perhaps the most significant way that history keeps influencing contemporary governance in African countries.

This chapter explains the emergence of modern Serbia within the broader context of European and Middle Eastern revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A largely illiterate society of peasant farmers, the Serbs of the Belgrade pashalik successfully resisted local Jannisary misrule. Despite the collapse of Karadjordje Petrović’s revolutionary statelet in 1813, by 1830 Serbia, led by Prince Miloš Obrenović, gained full autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, initially guaranteed by Russia and then collectively by the Powers. A dual Ottoman-Serb administration gradually transitioned into de facto independence for Serbia. The chapter discusses the impact of central and west European ideas on the formation of the Serbian national identity, and the role played by Austria and Russia in the regional politics. Serbia built a state administration, education and legal system and proto political parties emerged, pushing for a western-style constitution. The emancipation of the Serbs in the 1830s turned Serbia into a land of free peasants and an attractive destination for migrants from neighbouring empires. At the same time, the local Muslim population continued to emigrate.

Chapter 1 considers the material and discursive factors which defined the representation of hunger and appetite in the Renaissance theatre. It explores the lived experience of hunger and appetite in early modern England, situating these issues in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It engages with early modern dietaries, religious texts and popular cultural forms such as ballads in order to define the precise nature of early modern attitudes to hunger and appetite. The chapter concludes by considering the practical and theoretical implications of staging hunger and appetite on the Renaissance stage. It focusses on the theatres as places devoted to the sale of both plays and food, and considers the complex and multifaceted relationships of the period’s various audiences with the lived experience of hunger and appetite.

Chapter 4 analyzes the political dimension of the HECS framework in the context of Syria, contending that ideology played a key role in creating Syria’s vulnerabilities in the lead-up to the uprising. The chapter focuses on two key ideologies – Ba’athism in the 1970s and neoliberalism in the early 2000s – and their economic and agricultural policies. The Ba’athist regime under Hafez al-Assad effectively securitized food production to justify agricultural reforms designed to maintain the support of rural agrarian constitutiencies. The author shows that these Ba’athist policies, which included intensive irrigation, food and fuel subsidies, and large-scale hydroprojects, led to unsustainable water and agricultural practices and poor governance. Finally, the chapter examines the liberalizing reforms under Bashar al-Assad, which culminated in a 2005 shift to a social market economy, and concludes that they increased the vulnerability.